Actually we're making great strides in genetics on this topics, and a consensus is already emerging there around roughly 30-70% genetics vs everything else (which includes different kinds of environments, but also in some sense random chance) in the particular setting of western society. The current problems are as follows:
Actually we're making great strides in genetics on this topics, and a consensus is already emerging there around roughly 30-70% genetics vs everything else (which includes different kinds of environments, but also in some sense random chance) in the particular setting of western society. The current problems are as follows:
1)As alluded, the nature-vs-nurture framing is already very bad, which is why it's mostly been discontinued by serious researchers. There are many more environmental options beyond "nurture".
2) social scientists generally take little part in this research, since a substantial number of them take a hard ideological 0% genetics stance on many traits, which is simply implausible. Most geneticists have a reasonable stance that everything is some part nature, some part nurture, which is what we find again and again. A colleague of mine is currently working on certain known inborn disabilities in a collaboration project with social scientists, and their comments are mostly some variant of "we don't believe these disabilities have any genetic background" or "any research into the causes of disabilities is wasted & dangerous ableism, all of this should strictly go into how to support them". It risks toppling the entire collaboration.
3) Explained variance is actually a pretty bad measure. If you compare a person in Africa vs a person in Europe, environment will be so important as to wash everything out. If you compare two not genetically related persons raised in the same family, the differences will be mostly genetics + random chance. This is why there is a movement for sibling-based analysis to first establish facts for one reasonably well controlled case, which then can be tested and extended to further away settings such as maybe cousins at first, and so on.
4) Related to above, but many of the traits we know best are described as "environmentally mediated genetics". Case in point: lactose intolerance/non-persistence. The basic underlying trait, whether you persist in producing lactase and how much you produce, is in itself almost 100% genetics, with only rare exceptions concerning acute illness. However, whether you have any resulting negative repercussions is entirely due to whether you consume food products that include lactose. So if you would analyze downstream traits, such as rates of nausea, for a group of people who all have different degrees of lactose intolerance and who consume different quantities of lactose independent of their intolerance, you will get a result such as "nausea is X% nature and y% nurture" even assuming that you can magically strictly identify the nausea caused by lactose. As such, a much better model is to go beyond the simple nature-vs-nurture percentage points, and towards something like that biology sets up the basic rules and limits, and the environment decides where exactly you end up.
Yes, I agree that one of the fatal flaws in social science is the stubborn refusal to neglect genetics as a causal factor. I discuss this somewhat here and plan to write more on the topic in the future:
Actually we're making great strides in genetics on this topics, and a consensus is already emerging there around roughly 30-70% genetics vs everything else (which includes different kinds of environments, but also in some sense random chance) in the particular setting of western society. The current problems are as follows:
1)As alluded, the nature-vs-nurture framing is already very bad, which is why it's mostly been discontinued by serious researchers. There are many more environmental options beyond "nurture".
2) social scientists generally take little part in this research, since a substantial number of them take a hard ideological 0% genetics stance on many traits, which is simply implausible. Most geneticists have a reasonable stance that everything is some part nature, some part nurture, which is what we find again and again. A colleague of mine is currently working on certain known inborn disabilities in a collaboration project with social scientists, and their comments are mostly some variant of "we don't believe these disabilities have any genetic background" or "any research into the causes of disabilities is wasted & dangerous ableism, all of this should strictly go into how to support them". It risks toppling the entire collaboration.
3) Explained variance is actually a pretty bad measure. If you compare a person in Africa vs a person in Europe, environment will be so important as to wash everything out. If you compare two not genetically related persons raised in the same family, the differences will be mostly genetics + random chance. This is why there is a movement for sibling-based analysis to first establish facts for one reasonably well controlled case, which then can be tested and extended to further away settings such as maybe cousins at first, and so on.
4) Related to above, but many of the traits we know best are described as "environmentally mediated genetics". Case in point: lactose intolerance/non-persistence. The basic underlying trait, whether you persist in producing lactase and how much you produce, is in itself almost 100% genetics, with only rare exceptions concerning acute illness. However, whether you have any resulting negative repercussions is entirely due to whether you consume food products that include lactose. So if you would analyze downstream traits, such as rates of nausea, for a group of people who all have different degrees of lactose intolerance and who consume different quantities of lactose independent of their intolerance, you will get a result such as "nausea is X% nature and y% nurture" even assuming that you can magically strictly identify the nausea caused by lactose. As such, a much better model is to go beyond the simple nature-vs-nurture percentage points, and towards something like that biology sets up the basic rules and limits, and the environment decides where exactly you end up.
Yes, I agree that one of the fatal flaws in social science is the stubborn refusal to neglect genetics as a causal factor. I discuss this somewhat here and plan to write more on the topic in the future:
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/social-mobility-vs-upward-mobility